27 January 2007

Today marked a new beginning as my classmates and I were officially inducted into medicine via the White Coat Ceremony. It was a beautiful, celebratory event (a rare occurrence, that, in medical school, I find...), and yet I'm left with the feeling that I've crossed some great divide and am now in no-man's-land, so to speak.

I suppose that this isn't really a definitive moment--the concept that one can go from lay person to physician so quickly is, truly, ludicrous--but rather that it catalyzed an awakening into consciousness of just how much the process of medical education is changing me.

I don't have adequate words to describe what the experience of medical school feels like. I stared across the table at my parents during dinner tonight, trying, in vain, to explain my learning process here. Likening it to literature was the best I could do. Anatomy, I explained, is like learning how to diagram a sentence--what parts of speech are found, how the words are spelled and arranged, how punctuation is used.... PBL (which comprises the study of the "basic" medical sciences, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, biochemistry, microbiology, etc.) is like reading an anthology of literature and being expected to know not only the sentence structure (i.e. the anatomy), but the paragraphs, the chapters, the genres, the historical context of the work, etc. I'm not sure, though, that this is a sufficient analogy--but how else am I to explain this? I can only stammer, grasp at straws, and watch the rift between myself and the rest of the world grow wider and wider....

I'm hesitant even to write here. I wrote volumes last term, but not much of it felt "publishable." Is it the context? Or have I already been inducted into secrecy? I don't know. I don't know how to describe this life...but I intend to keep making the effort....

a little disclaimer...

i'm a medical student. just a student. so please, don't take anything i say too seriously. remember that i was an english literature major as an undergrad, so there is much fiction to be found in these pages. do you think i'm telling a story about you or your illness? more likely, you're tapping into my sense of "everyman"--that is, your story resonates with what i write here because it's not so uncommon after all. need help? please, please go see your physician.